The use of individually quick frozen ingredients (IQF) in stir-fried meals is well known. In such meals, the vegetable and meat ingredients are all of roughly the same size. Typically, these ingredients are about 0.5 cm to 1 cm long, and weigh no more than 10 grams. During the preparation of these stir-fried meals, a pan is filled with the ingredients and heated while the ingredients are stirred. Such meals can be prepared in about 10 minutes, but require that the consumer be involved during their preparation. This is because different ingredients heat at different rates, and because some heat-sensitive ingredients such as sauces can change in consistency or flavor if allowed to become too hot.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,077,066 discloses a combination of frozen food constituents and dried sauce concentrate on a tray, and the addition of water to the tray prior to heating its contents in a microwave oven. During preparation of the meal, the tray is preferably removed from the oven and the ingredients therein stirred before it is again returned to the microwave oven. This mixing may be necessary to dissolve the dried sauce concentrate and bind the resulting sauce to the meal ingredients.
Other plated meals are known that contain IQF ingredients upon which a liquid sauce is dosed. These meals enable easy variation of the IQF ingredients in the manufacturing of frozen meals comprising them, but like that disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 5,077,066, their preparation requires stirring even thawing and heating is desired.
The lack of uniform and quick heating is typically less substantial for packages containing food products of the same type and size, such as packages of even sized meatballs or vegetables. There exists a need, however, for a frozen meal that contains ingredients that are preferably not mixed and yet requires little or no stirring by the consumer during its preparation. This need is particularly acute for meals that contain ingredients of different sizes, instead of those wherein the ingredients are substantially of equal size and measure only about 1 to 3 cm in length.